At the risk of posting way too many suggestions, I have one more. It seems somewhat obvious but I haven't been able to find it anywhere else in the forums.

Emerge is an incredible tool once you have your USE variable set the way you want them. This is not stressed near enough in the install or user guides. I would propose that sample USE variables for a server, workstation, gnome workstation, kde workstation, gnome/kde workstation, non-X workstation, etc. be created and during install, the user either must pick one or become blinded by a note blinking on their screen in large multi-color letters telling them to pick one or they'll end up recompiling half their system, twice. Or add USECLASS in make.defaults where a user can specify workstation, server, non-X workstation, etc. and get a sensible default USE variable for their specific needs.

The meaning of USE variables is well described in the developer howto, but normal users should be made aware of them as well, especially for obscure ones like "trusted", etc. Maybe a dependency tree of them would be useful as well, such as gnome implies X, etc.

That's the idea behind the concept of 'profiles'. It is planned to have profile-sever, profile-kde, profile-gnome, etc. But at the moment it is a "roll your own" affair.

If you wanted to play with this concept, cp -a /usr/portage/profiles/default-1.0 /usr/portage/profiles/myprofile. Customize the files under myprofile to your hearts content. Then repoint the /etc/make.profile symlink to /usr/portage/profiles/myprofile.